Duane Linklater

2015, Natural ABS 3D print from collection of Utah Museum of Fine Art, Dimensions variable, Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery

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Duane Linklater presents eight sculptures made by copying selected unauthored artworks from the Native American Collection at the Utah Museum of Fine Art using 3D scanning and printing technologies. The original works, which embody the unique culture and characteristics of Native North Americans, from the Tsimshian, Kwakwaka’wakw, and Haida of the Northwest Coast of North America (now Canada) to the Rio Grande Pueblo and Santa Clara Pueblo of the American Southwest, are copied through the power of the new technology. This work allows us to read the complex issues of the past colonial era with regard to cultural artifacts being presented within the framework of current museum exhibitions, stripped of their original functional, ritualistic, and artistic context. Utah Museum of Fine Art curator Whitney Tassie has described the work as follows: “The data lost in this imperfect process echoes the names, stories, purposes, and meanings that are erased during an object’s cultural translation and ethnographic transformation in a museum. We assume museum presentations are factual and unbiased, but Duane Linklater’s installation encourages us to see the historical filters that shade exhibitions and our receptions of them.”

Duane Linklater

b. 1976. Lives and works in North Bay. Duane Linklater is Omask?ko Cree, from Moose Cree First Nation in Northern Ontario and is currently based in North Bay, Ontario. He has exhibited and screened his work nationally and internationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Family Business Gallery, New York; Te Tuhi Centre for Arts Auckland; City Arts Centre, Edinburgh; Institute of Contemporary Arts Philadelphia; and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. His collaborative film project with Brian Jungen, Modest Livelihood, was originally presented at the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Center as a part of dOCUMENTA (13) with subsequent exhibitions of this work at the Logan Centre Gallery at the University of Chicago (curated by Monika Szewcyyk), and the Art Gallery of Ontario (curated by Kitty Scott). Duane was also the recipient of the 2013 Sobey Art Award, an annual prize given to an artist under 40. Duane is currently represented by Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.